I remember it like it was yesterday. May 1991. I was living in Verona and working for the Newark Fire Department. I was scheduled for my first of two 14-hour night shifts at Rescue 1. It was early May and I went fishing before I had to be at work and relive the first tour at 5 pm.
This was when I was in my all-about-trout glory. I had just started fly fishing and was trying to get my first trout on the fly. That day I stayed relatively local and fished the Rockaway River in Boonton in a place called Grace Lord Park. I can't even come up with a number of times I fished there over the early years.
My trout fishing days grew as I got older and moved from Monmouth County and the Manasquan River to Essex County, which put me closer to waters like the Rockaway, Pequest, Paulinskill, and the Big Flat Brook. A few years after my first trout on the fly, and after The River Runs Through It came out, I discovered the Catskills, and it was all over from there.
But on this day I fished with some old beginner fly fishing set up from who knows where. I had a box of beginner flies most likely from WalMart. One of those flies was a bumble bee pattern and that's what the above ugly beast of a trout fell for. I sight fished that fish and was lucky to land it. And of course this was the days before cell phones, and moreso the days of disposable cameras, of which I didn't have.
I was so excited and wanted to get a photo with my catch, which was surely going home with me. I went back to my truck and then drove to a photo shop on Main Street. There they took passport photos with a Kodak polaroid camera. I asked if they would take my picture, actually two of them. Luckily I had some cash on my to pay the bill. Of course this was way before debit cards were around, and using credit cards meant sliding the carbon paper over your card to make an imprint. What a goof, but I'm glad I have them today.
And talking about goof. Look at that hat, "Trout Fisherman" it says, and I wore it proudly. That vest was my old photojournalist vest from my earlier days working at The Red Bank Register. It was now used to hold my fly boxes, Powerbait, and meal worms. I didn't even know how to hold the fly rod, and the fish, for the picture. But it didn't matter back then as everything I caught was "fillet and release" into an aluminum coffin that layered the bottom of my freezer.
But what I also remember about that day of glory was what happened on my drive home. I was so excited that I didn't remember my 1986 Dodge Ram 50 was running on fumes, and on Route 280 in Roseland I ran out of gas. It was 1991 and cell phones weren't out yet but somehow I got a hold of my co-worker Mike Lubertazzi who lived in East Hanover. He too was getting ready to head for the firehouse. Mike was our chef and always shopped for the meal before he came to work so he was around and able to help a brother out.
Mike came out and got me enough gas to get me to a station to fill up. But before I headed down the hill to work in Newark I stopped by my house in Vernona. I had just enough time to fillet that fish up. It wasn't fresh from a cooler, it was stored in one of those creels with the tape measure that ran along the outside of it. The thinking was back then that if you kept it filled with water and lined with grass it would be just like having it on ice, yeah, no. It might had been 2-3 hours since it took its last breath in the freshwater, but it didn't matter to me. A few nights later I ate that stocked pellet-fed breeder feeling like a caveman from the old hunting and gathering days. Those stocked trout slathered in egg and breadcrumbs and fried in butter sure do taste good even if they weren't fresh and were coated with a layer of ice from the freezer burn.
That's 35 years ago. It's been a while since I've fished for stocked trout and the taste of pellets.